BLEED

BLEED is a large work that encompasses O’Connor’s love of complexity and layering in dance. It is the culminating work of a two-year project during which he constructed three other pieces, Secret Mary, poem and Sister, all from very different source material and each with an entirely different cast. He then collapsed these into this fourth work, simultaneously remembering and forgetting the previous dances. All 11 of the magical performers from the other works are here yet the movement material is gone. Ghosts of the other dances resonate through the new work and shape its form but they are subterranean and exert their pressure on this new construction from the caves of memory.

SISTER

Sister re-embraces an idea first developed by O’Connor in his work Four Sister Dances that premiered at The Kitchen in 1989. “I tried to escape the omnipresence of theme and variation in dance by immersing myself in what I call “variation and variation.” I looked to sisters as a metaphor for duplication, sameness and difference. I was attempting to validate a different idea regarding “development” in a dance, one that didn’t offer an anchoring point.” In Sister, hyper-intricate rhythmic systems provide the chatter between the performers as they are propelled into an increasingly mysterious cascade of events.

Sister was commissioned by the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois and is the third work in Tere O’Connor’s BLEED project investigating the complex strata of information comprising a dance.